The Art of X-Ray Reading ─ How the Secrets of 25 Great Works of Literature Will Improve Your Writing

Roy Peter Clark, one of America's most influential writing teachers, offers writing lessons we can draw from 25 great texts.

Where do writers learn their best moves? They use a technique that Roy Peter Clark calls X-ray reading, a form of reading that lets you penetrate beyond the surface of a text to see how meaning is actually being made. In THE ART OF X-RAY READING, Clark invites you to don your X-ray reading glasses and join him on a guided tour through some of the most exquisite and masterful literary works of all time, fromThe Great Gatsby to Lolita to The Bluest Eye, and many more. Along the way, he shows you how to mine these masterpieces for invaluable writing strategies that you can add to your arsenal and apply in your own writing. Once you've experienced X-ray reading, your writing will never be the same again.

Roy Peter Clark is senior scholar at the Poynter Institute, one of the most prestigious schools for journalists in the world. He has taught writing at every level--to schoolchildren and Pulitzer Prize-winning authors--for more than thirty years. A writer who teaches and a teacher who writes, he has authored or edited seventeen books on writing and journalism, includingHow to Write Short, Writing Tools, The Glamour of Grammar, andHelp! for Writers. He lives in St. Petersburg, Florida.